Social Media and Your Business — What’s All the Hoopla About Anyway?

It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t know a thing about social media or how it could help my business — or yours — and quite frankly didn’t even care.

Let’s face it, we’re all extremely busy and it’s practically impossible to make time to learn something new, especially when you’re not sure if it’s going to pay off in terms of real customers or not.

It’s sort of like buying the first model year of a car. Better off waiting until all the bugs are worked out, right?

But just because I didn’t understand the importance of all this new stuff didn’t stop my clients from asking me about it.

Some were extremely knowledgeable while others wondered what all of this social media stuff meant, if it was worth their time, or if it was just another fad.

Whether or not you feel your business “needs” any of this, one thing’s for sure: Almost everyone wants to know more about social media, the Internet and SEO – search engine optimization.

What I Learned — And What You Need To Know

Inherently we all know the importance of being ranked on the first page of Google and other search engines, and that companies are using social media to gain market share, interact with their customers, increase sales and decrease costs and overhead.

In fact, throughout this process I learned quite a bit about how Google ranks my website and what I needed to do to ensure that I was always rising in the search engine rankings, and how I could use social media tools to further my interactions with you and leverage myself better in the process.

Here’s what I learned:

You should tie your website to a blog — Users like to get regularly updated content, and guess what? So does Google! You should have a website that also contains a blog — or is a blog — even if you hire others to update it for you.

Your website needs to use a Content Management System (CMS) — All this means is that you won’t need to know html programming, or constantly harass your web guy to make one small change somewhere deep within your website. In fact, this post you are reading now? I wrote it myself in an editor using WordPress — as simple as can be and no coding required!

Connect directly to your customers using social media — I know you want more from me than just the occasional article in a magazine or interview on TV. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube will allow me to constantly keep in touch with you, provide you with cutting edge strategies and information, and give you more personal attention than I ever could through just a website alone.

How to get your website on the first page of all the search engines — My website was not being found at all before. Now it is! All because I listened to the experts and set up my website to be SEO-friendly right from the beginning. It’s something that is vital for your online presence to become a long term success, and attract organic traffic that is totally free.

How to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase salesand customers — Now that my website has been SEO’d (Search Engine Optimized), the next step is to get more exposure for myself so that visitors that are interested in what I teach — profit, leadership and management strategies for small businesses — can find me easily by performing a search on Google or another search engine. But your website will NEVER rank high if you aren’t doing OFF-Site SEO work once your ON-Site work is finished. I leave that to the experts and get out of their way.

I also learned that getting visitors to your website is only half the battle.

My previous website wasn’t doing anything right, so it’s no wonder that all of the business I was getting was a result of OFF-line efforts while virtually no leads were coming from ON-line efforts.

What many don’t realize is that being ranked highly only matters when your website is capable of converting tire kickers into paying customers. That’s when you make money.

Anything less is a waste of time and precious profit dollars.

I know it sounds pretty straightforward but the devil is in the detail — as I came to learn the hard way.

Who Could I Trust To Help Me Do This Right?

It seems like everyone is a self proclaimed Internet expert and somehow they all have my email address.

After endless pestering I became numb and skeptical of all the offers to help me “fix” my online presence.

This is my old site...it wasn't very good for a lot of reasons. Click on the image above for a larger view.

Too many smart business people have invested loads of money and spent lots of time to build optimized websites incorporating all the social media icons in hopes of improving their search engine ranking and sales, only to be disappointed.

I know firsthand how it feels.

But despite my busy schedule, skepticism, distrust, and fear of the unknown, I realized that social media was here to stay and that other businesses were using it to promote and win new clients — and if I didn’t utilize this powerful medium of interaction, I’d be left behind.

So, cautiously, I tried again.

This time I did my homework and, thankfully, it paid off!

The journey began by defining how to use my new website to better serve clients.

There’s no better way than knowing and understanding exactly what your clients need and delivering it to them in as many mediums as possible.

In my case clients want access to my proprietary business tools, training and mentoring to help them rapidly improve performance and profit.

For the past ten years I’ve been delivering these services exclusively to private clients and associations around the world, all the while knowing that small business leaders everywhere needed this information more than anyone to grow their businesses and their people.

And what better way to offer and deliver that information than online?

So I got to work.

Welcome To My New Website!

I’m excited to announce that after months of development I’m ready to begin making these confidential resources available to you via my brand new website.

I sincerely hope you like it!

In the coming months I’m going to be giving you tons of great resources and content to grow your own business — whether you’re a business owner or executive.

And I couldn’t start this process online without walking the walk, right?

So I wanted to ensure that you could gain all of these valuable insights and information from me in whatever manner you wish — whether in person, by watching videos of my interviews, reading my blog, or through other special products and services that will be coming your way soon!

So, be sure to bookmark the new site, subscribe to my RSS feed, or sign up for my email updates to ensure you don’t miss out on how to gain access to this important information as soon as I put it up on the site!

One More Thing…

Now here’s the best part — as far as you are concerned.

Last week while taking some time off, it dawned on me that for many companies the social media and Internet challenges that I went through remain overwhelmingly real.

Perhaps your website isn’t as good as it could be, or maybe you aren’t ranking well on the search engines, or maybe your website isn’t delivering value to your customers so you are losing sales or important interaction with them…

Whatever your frustration, I know that as a busy business owner you’ve got bigger things on your mind from day-to-day, BUT you realize that you simply cannot ignore your website presence any longer.

Therefore, I’ve decided to make all my Internet research, resources and “how-to” information that I used to build my website available to you for FREE!

But we all know nothing’s free so we wait for the other shoe to fall.

This is where reputation comes into play.

I work with almost 10,000 business professionals, all of whom know that I always try to over deliver.

That being said, social media and the Internet is not my business, nor will it ever be.

So I figured, why not give you some of this valuable information and help the people who help me?

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: I asked those who helped me put this website together for their precious time and valuable information to help YOU with your website and online efforts because I trust them and I know their information will be priceless to you as it has been for me.

Are you interested?

Watch your email over the next few days for instructions on how to access this information — trust me, you won’t want to miss this!

Please leave me a comment below letting me know what you think of the website, any comments/suggestions you have for me, and what type of information I can put together to help YOUR business online.

I certainly know the value of social media when my gifted 13 year old who use to love to spend 90% of her time reading and 10% networking on the Internet now spends her time reading 10% of the time and 90% networking only 1year later. Love the site. Nice job. Can’t wait to get started! Looking forward to the next blog (I don’t even know what that is) and/or email. Aaron Kilman

Bob,
I like the site. And I liked your marketing of the launch. I am reasonably familiar with most social media except twitter but want to discover how to leverage these for a strategic purpose. Look forward to further learning experiences. Congrats on the launch. David McNutt

James, you are correct and I will review this with my site development team. My understanding was that they are using public domain images, but if we post an image that isn’t by mistake, we want to know so that we can correct our oversight.

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